“We can try to fix that.” I got up, picking my phone up from my desk. “We’ll meet Sam if she’s free and have our lunch outside, okay? You can get an ice cream, or an iced coffee, or something.”
“Alright, you’ve convinced me.” He grinned.
Ten minutes later, the three of us were on a bench outside the station, shading our eyes from the sun. I’d already eaten my sandwich, not wanting the bread to dry out in the heat, and Sam and Stephen were engaged in a conversation about some drama show they’d both been watching.
I flicked through my phone, which I usually used for little more than texting and calling, and loaded up my emails. I got onto the messaging website the teens had been using, curiosity making me keen to see what they were talking about, as they sent new messages frequently.
“What’re you looking at?” Sam asked, leaning over to put her chin on my shoulder.
“Mm, a work thing.”
“Looks like a messaging site to me,” Sam said doubtfully.
I huffed a laugh. “It is. It’s also a work thing. A bunch of teenagers have been meeting on it and getting themselves…” I trailed off, frowning.
As I’d been speaking to Sam, a flurry of new messages had come in all of a sudden.
“Something’s happening,” I muttered and saw in my peripheral vision that Stephen had looked up.
The messages kept coming from a whole variety of users, and I scanned through them, trying to make sense of it all. Once I did, I swore, getting to my feet fast enough to jolt Sam.
“Darren?” She looked up at me, clearly taken aback, but I didn’t have time to explain.
“Stephen, we gotta go,” I made a move towards the car, glancing back at Sam. “I’m sorry, I’ll catch you later, okay?”
“Sure,” she said, giving me a sad smile.
“What’s going on?” Stephen asked as we bundled into the car, him in the driving seat and me busy putting a call through to the fire service.
“Get us over to Acomb,” I told him, just before the firefighters picked up, and I relayed the information I had before asking if there’d been any new fires reported.
There had.
I got off the phone and swore, hitting the door with my palm. Stephen swung us around a corner, the sirens wailing as we cut through the city.
“Darren?” Stephen prompted sharply. “Did you get this from the messaging site? About another fire?”
“Aye, they’re all talking about it,” I grunted. “That it’d been set off, and how it was burning, and who ran off early. All of that.”
“Jesus.” Stephen shook his head. “Where am I going exactly? Is it a house that’s on fire?” He sounded alarmed.
“The firefighters said an abandoned property was set alight just now. They’re still making their way over.”
“Thank god it wasn’t inhabited.”
“Aye, I just hope nobody was inside, anyway.”
Stephen glanced at me. “Homeless, you mean?”
“Right. In this heat, I’d take any shade I could get.”
“Let’s just hope no-one was hurt.” Stephen’s hands tightened around the wheel, and he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. We saw the billows of black smoke, like a shadow against the bright sky, long before we’d gotten close-by.
We pulled up sharply, getting as close as we could to the house, and jogged over to the scene. Multiple firefighters were tackling the blaze which was producing enough smoke to sting my eyes and make me cough.
“Get back!” a firefighter yelled at Stephen and me. We retreated a short way but stayed close, watching as the hoses were deployed on the house and the fire hissed and spat in defiance.
“It’s so dry,” I shouted over the roaring of the flames.
The grass all around the abandoned property was worryingly long, looking very much like available tinder. One of the fire hoses was being used to dose the ground, cutting the fire off, while the other tackled the fire itself, which was tearing up the right side of the house.
I turned away from the brilliant heat, my face hot and black dots dancing in front of my eyes from the brightness, and scanned the gathered crowd for teenagers. But it was mostly adults, lingering and watching in horrified fascination as the house burned. The teenagers had run already, no doubt, sprinting off as soon as they were sure that the fire had taken. Or maybe they’d lingered for a few moments to cheer and gloat over what they’d done before they slipped away.
Someone must have seen them, I thought. On a day like this, the pavements were busy with people moving around, even in a residential area like this. There had to be someone who walked by or looked out of their window at the right moment to see the teens who did this. Better yet would be a CCTV camera, but I couldn’t see any when I looked around.
The fire was uncomfortably hot, making me sweat heavily and leaving my face feeling like it was sunburnt. On a cold night in November, a piled-up bonfire was exactly what you wanted, but the very opposite was true on a broiling day in July. Stephen and I moved back to the edge of the crowd to escape the worst of the heat and smoke, which the breeze nudged in our direction every few minutes.
While we were waiting for the firefighters to wrangle the blaze down to something manageable, I called into the station to let Rashford know what was happening and where we were. She cursed when she heard about there being another fire and that this one wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere, either.
“Stay and talk to the fire service,” she encouraged. “Find out what you can. I’ll send over a junior officer to help you keep an eye on things and fend off anybody wanting to stick their nose. This is escalating, and we need to get on top of it, particularly before the press starts poking around.”
“I agree, thank you, ma’am,” I said, grateful that she recognised the severity of
